Schools

SC: I think I’ve mentioned before that Rabbi Pastinsky brought us to Vancouver because we were only one of two Jewish families living in New Westminster. That was in 1933. Our more of an involvement with the Jewish community started. We used to go to school at Strathcona and take two lunches. One was for the noon hour lunch and the other was after a two hour Hebrew class or Yiddish, I can’t remember which—our second lunch and then we would have two hours of Hebrew or Yiddish.

NK: Can you I ask you who’s ‘we’?

SC: The children, the young people, everyone lived…

NK: Your friends?

SC: No, all of the Jewish, there were only five hundred Jewish in the city, which meant that there were a few only not that many young children. All of the kids went to the Heatley Avenue synagogue. Jewish…

NK: Friends from school?

SC: Mm hmm. I believe Mr. Katznelson was the principal and Ms. Jaffe, Sylvia Jaffe was our teacher. We went for three years and then the Jewish community moved from the Schara Tzedeck which as I said was the only synagogue, the Orthodox, it moved from there to Oak Street.

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SB: I was married in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-four. There wasn’t too many Jewish people in the city, but what there was usually concentrated at the Schara Tzedeck shul at the corner of Heatley and Pender Street. That was the centre of all social affairs and that was, a few years afterwards, the community centre was built on Oak Street. And that place then was the place where all the Jewish people had their social affairs. But the shul on Pender Street and Dunlevy was the only one in Vancouver at the time where on special Jewish holidays the people came to daven and hold prayers and meet others. A few years after I arrived they built another shul in the area now…

AK: Where the present Schara Tzedeck is?

SB: Yes, yes, you know where it is?

AK: At Oak and 16th.

SB: Oak and 16th. And then they built the other shul, Beth Israel, and they had a few different rabbis since that shul has been built. During those years, from 1924, many Jewish people came to Vancouver from all parts of Canada. At the first shul at Pender and Dunlevy the number of Jewish people living in Vancouver was very limited, but as the years went by and the people living here told their friends how beautiful the climate was and so on, by the year 1930 there was about 10,000 Jewish people in the city of Vancouver. People of very Orthodox and others progressive but they all came to the same shul. Later on a more progressive school opened up on Broadway. It was called the Peretz School. They done away with a lot of Orthodox principles, it was quite modern, so parents sent their children to the Peretz School where they were taught Jewish and Hebrew, and not many of the Orthodox things that the…learnt years ago. Most of the activities at that time was carried on at the Schara Tzedeck synagogue, social affairs and so on ‘til eight or ten years later the first community centre was built on Oak Street near Broadway. That was a gathering place for all social affairs. But on special holidays the very sacred ones and so on, all the Jewish people in the city of Vancouver until the community centre was built, met at the Schara Tzedeck at the corner of Heatley and Pender.

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BS: Now Vivian, I’ll turn to you. Did you go to secular school or religious school?

VG: I went to Talmud Torah, the day school, from kindergarten to graduation I went to Talmud Torah.

BS: And what memories do you have of those days of going to school?

VG: I didn’t love school in general but I actually did...my favourite teacher was Mrs. Kron, I loved her and what was really interesting is that my older daughter also had Mrs. Kron, both my daughters went to Talmud Torah and Ariel had Mrs. Kron and Mrs. Kron would regularly call her Aviva which is my name, well she looks like me and acts a lot like me and Mrs. Kron kept saying, “Well it’s like having you back in my class again.” She was lovely, I really enjoyed her and she was of course incredibly Zionist, all of our projects were doing the map of Israel and knowing all the cities in Israel, and all the customs of Israel, that I enjoyed tremendously so it was the only part of school that I really liked. And I remember we had to go until four o’clock and we would be sitting and looking out the window at all the public school kids getting out at three o’clock and marching away but it’s better I guess than having to go to afternoon school which was worse, we only had the one extra hour.

BS: Were you able to read Hebrew?

VG: Yes, all of our Hebrew teachers except for Mrs. Kron were Israeli so we actually learned Hebrew very well, I’m trying to remember the name of this really lovely young woman... maybe Mrs. Klausner, she was married to a Canadian, to a Vancouver boy, but she was Israeli and she taught us really excellent, I find languages pretty easy so when I graduated I could speak Hebrew really well and with a very Israeli accent which was very convenient.

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BS: Reva, early education – did you go to a Talmud Torah or what kind of school did you?

RH: Well I went to Talmud Torah but it was before the days that Talmud Torah was a day school and when I grew up I went to the Talmud Torah for kindergarten and then I started in the public school for Grade 1 and I think when I was in about Grade 3 they opened the Talmud Torah day school but I was already at Grade 3 and they only started at Grade 1 and then they kept adding a year later but I was always two years ahead of them. So I went to the evening school, so I went to elementary school, public school Grade 1 and then I started at Talmud Torah which was four afternoons a week after school, which I hated, and I went until about Grade 7 all the way through and I remember I hated it every minute. But I definitely did get a good grounding in Hebrew, I learned the basic fundamentals of Hebrew and when I went to Israel after high school I very, very quickly started speaking and the foundation that I had received in Talmud Torah served me in good stead and it really all kind of came together. And the negative attitude that I had about going to school all those years was very much transformed when I was living in Israel and it became a living language instead of a torture to go to school.

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